SocialBoost

Are You Seizing the Power of Social Media Attribution?

Few digital marketers entirely neglect marketing analytics. But are they seizing their full power? Hardly. Most just scratch the surface of what’s possible.

The challenge is magnified in the social media realm. While your average tweeters usually take inventory of the basics, such as share counts and likes, very few are equipped to unravel deeper and more meaningful data that can be attributed to leads and sales.

This tactic is called social media attribution. To get at the data, you need a robust social media management platform, such as Oktopost. And to help you get your head around the immense potential of this sophisticated form of tracking, I called on the company’s CEO Danial Kushner. Press that play button, and 17 minutes from now, you’re going to have a much stronger grasp of how you can elevate your game with social media data.

Barry: I read a post on your blog about tracking social media KPIs where you wrote, “One of the reasons some B2B marketers are resistant to using social media is the difficulty in measuring social media ROI.”

Daniel: Yeah. When we look at marketing—and I’m focusing on the B2B side—almost every activity is easy to measure. If I’m spending 50 thousand or 100 thousand on a tradeshow booth, I can count how many business cards I collected at the end of the day. If we’re doing a webinar, I know how many people registered and attended. And even if I’m doing paid ads, we have the platforms in place to help us measure the leads and we can follow that down the pipeline.

But when it comes to social, the majority of the metrics are all around likes, shares, retweets, and followers. There is no real correlation between that and ROI. So being able to tie social media to lead generation efforts and pipeline activity is going to give us a picture of how social is really helping the business.

Barry: It’s about bringing something into the executive offices the boss actually wants to hear—information that delivers something on the bottom-line, right?

Daniel: Exactly. Before founding Oktopost, I was a vice president of marketing at a company called Nolio, which was later acquired by CA, Computer Associates. I used to meet with the CEO once a month, and he just had one question for me: “How many leads can you generate for us this month?” That was all he cared about. The main objective was leads for the sales team.

If a large portion of activity is on social media, you want to be able to measure the social media and correlate that activity to the leads being generated.

Barry: You showed me a report published by Forrester, and in it is something that says, “Marketing needs to measure the sales opportunities generated and use data to continuously optimize the ROI achieved across a well-considered marketing mix.” That speaks to marketing justifying its existence and its efforts, doesn’t it?

Daniel: Definitely. In enterprises, at least 80 to 90 percent of their budget has to have a positive ROI. That report also goes on to mention that marketers who aren’t able to measure the ROI of their marketing efforts are going to have a very hard time retaining their budgets for next year. The business wants to see the dollars they put in and what they’re getting out of it.

Barry: So that brings up social media attribution. You need to measure social media activity and show it means something to the bottom line—otherwise called “attribution.”

Daniel: Definitely. Let me give you an example. Let’s say we’re doing this interview, and it’s going to be published on a blog. I’m sure my marketing team is going promote it on the Oktopost Twitter account, our LinkedIn company page, and Facebook page.